Google’s Eric Schmidt hammers the NSA

Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt is slamming the NSA for possibly using the company’s data centers as well as people’s phone records, even questioning the legality of the spy agency’s conduct.

“It’s really outrageous that the National Security Agency was looking between the Google data centers, if that’s true,” Schmidt said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal published Monday. “The steps that the organization was willing to do without good judgment to pursue its mission and potentially violate people’s privacy, it’s not OK.”

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Schmidt said that Google had registered complaints to the NSA as well as President Barack Obama and Congress. He also said if the NSA has collected phone records of 320 million people to identify 300 people who might be a potential threat, “That’s just bad public policy…and perhaps illegal.”

“There clearly are cases where evil people exist, but you don’t have to violate the privacy of every single citizen of America in order to find them,” Schmidt said.